The Devil's Recruit (Alexander Seaton 4) by MacLean S. G

Author:MacLean, S. G. [MacLean, S. G.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2013-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

13

Flights of Fancy

I had been bone weary by the time I had reached back to my house from the ship, but there was to be no getting to sleep until a full report of everything I had seen on my visit aboard had been given to Zander, who had forced himself to stay awake until my return.

And so it was with a sinking heart that I read the missive sent early to my door the next morning by the session clerk of St Nicholas. Further alarms at St Fittick’s Kirk across the water at Nigg Bay had worsened the state of the minister’s mind and given rise to rumours of illicit gatherings and unnatural practices that the session there urgently requested our help in putting an end to. By some justification elusive to us, William and I had been deputed by our session clerk to meet with our brethren at Nigg and there to investigate the nature of the problem.

‘Babbling about witches, and fairies and spirits flying through the trees, speaking in tongues, things risen from the dead. They had to pull him from the pulpit. I hope to God he was drunk when they did so,’ said William.

I echoed his hope. If John Leslie had been drunk in the pulpit, then he would surely lose it, but if he had been sober and talking of witnessing spirits in flight in the kirkyard, then a much worse fate might befall him.

It was a cold morning, and the wind whipped right off the sea to find us on the benches of the ferry as it edged its way carefully across the mouth of the Dee from Futty to the southern shore at Torry. I had not drunk to excess, nor anything like it on Ormiston’s boat the night before, but all the same, I would ten times rather have been in my unmoving classroom, with its modicum of warmth, than amongst the sway and swell of this open boat. ‘It is a wonder they let John Leslie preach yesterday,’ I said. ‘He’d been babbling five days at least – for it was Wednesday that we heard of it at the session.’

William, struggling despite his wrappings of hide and fur to keep the cold out, muttered his agreement. ‘He had come again to his senses by Friday, it seems, and the session thought the episode passed. They have been so afraid that they will lose their minister and not get another one that they’ve turned a blind to what every man knows: Leslie is a drunkard. I have it on authority from John Spalding, my clerk who has his ear to every rumour in the town, that he swore to the elders that he would not touch another drop. And yet yesterday he was at it again, rambling and railing about the ungodly dead rising and dancing in St Fittick’s kirkyard.’

The look on my face must have betrayed my mind as we passed silently by the recruiting ship on its moorings. There was no sign of any of the soldiers on deck yet.

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